


In/Out

by marginaliana



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Fog, Gen, Typical Night Vale Weirdness, mind-sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2018-01-09 11:36:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1145501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana/pseuds/marginaliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos wakes to fog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In/Out

**Author's Note:**

> This would not have been what it is without the help of implicated2, who deserves so much thanks.

Carlos wakes to fog. He's slept with the windows cracked open and moisture has slipped into the room like a cat, settled itself on every available surface. He feels it first – the press of it over his cheeks, his eyelids, his lips – and when he opens his eyes it's there, soft and glittering.

He breathes in. Intellectually, Carlos knows, he has already breathed in, has taken the fog into his nose and mouth and throat and lungs as he slept. He knows there's no way not to breathe it in, not when it caresses his face and insinuates its way into him. But that is not what matters. What matters is that now he is awake, that his eyes are open, and that he breathes in.

 

All the things that make Carlos himself slip away like water. His hands, his eyes, his ears. His hair. The dark expanse of his skin. His lips and his tongue and his bones. His allergy to shellfish. His body, dissolving like sugar into coffee. His first kiss, his first kiss with Cecil. His mother, his father, his brother. His theories about the plasticity of time in Night Vale, his ability to use a centrifuge. His memories, shed like loose flakes of skin. 

The only thing left is the faint kernel at the heart of himself – the knowledge of himself as a self, the curiosity and wonder. 

And then he is somewhere else. He is some _one_ else. 

 

His feet crunch against the soil, the sound echoing loudly against the soft hush of the wind over the corn. Because of the fog he can't see more than a few feet in front of him, but that doesn't matter because there is nothing to see, and so he is walking the furrows this morning like any other morning. A small voice in the back of his mind says his name – John Peters, you know, the farmer – but it's nothing more than a whisper. Beneath his palms the corn gives up its secrets, reveals broken stalks or three-headed rootworm or the sudden and inexplicable appearance of actual human ears growing out of the ears (that's only happened once, he knows, but it was certainly memorable and Big Rico bought almost the whole crop that year). When he is done, he will take the broken stalks to the pigs and then sit on the porch with the coffee that will, by then, be brewed, and—

His mama is calling up the stairs. "Breakfast!" He turns away from watching the fog outside his window make strange patterns where it swirls against the glass. He knows that if he dawdles much longer mama will threaten to let his brother eat everything. It's an empty threat – at least, she's never done it yet – but it's enough to make him thump down the stairs, careful not to let the movement disturb the placement of the paperback tucked into his left back pocket. For a moment he feels too short, and surely his elbows don't stick out like this, do they? It must be all that growing that mama says he still has left to do. He will need his breakfast for growing, today and all the next days. He will need to be strong, because Tamika says so – and Tamika knows, more than any of them, how to be strong. When to be strong. Not today, not yet, but Tamika says soon, and so he shoves the book a bit deeper into his pocket and drops into his chair, says a hasty thanks in the direction of the bloodstone circle on the side table and reaches for the congee— 

She is small, she is round. Water beads in delicate constellations across her back, dripping down her sides in a slow trickle. It pools, cold and slightly metallic, beneath her, soaking the wood planks of the table on the porch. Something inside her wants to shiver, but she does not know how. She feels homesick for the cool of the river, the soothing rush of it, but she can't indulge in homesickness now, not when she has an appointment with the Dean of Unpronounceable Students at 9:30 and a photo op at 11, not when there is so much to do—

She pulls on a long-sleeved shirt over her bra, grateful for the fog because it means one more day when she won't have to work out how to hide the sigils that are just visible on the inside of her elbow. Tomorrow it'll be back to stealing Mom's makeup, or maybe pretending she's cut herself accidentally, or trying to start a new fad for armbands. Presuming, that is, that the sigils don't grow too quickly, that she can figure out a way to slow or stop the transformation – she might try talking to one of the scientists, because she's read somewhere (On the internet? She can't remember where.) that science can do some amazing things with neo-thaumaturgic hormones these days. Maybe she'll skip class today and do that, say she'd gotten lost in the fog and couldn't find the school, that could work—

He is grinding his teeth; Malcolm's been too busy studying to do the laundry this week, and there isn't a clean balaclava to be found in the whole damned house. Of course _Malcolm_ doesn't think it's a big deal – he doesn't have to have his head stuck in one all day, doesn't have to get it from all the other secret police for smelling like fish guts the second day running. He should've known not to stand so close when they opened the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex yesterday. Maybe it's the thought of the fish odor that's making him strangely reluctant to go back. He's late already, though, and the fog is going to make him later still, so he just digs through the laundry basket, sniffing each of them, then picks the least disgusting one and gives it a spray of diluted lemon juice from the bottle under the sink. He stuffs it into his pocket and heads for the door. "Love you," he calls into the kitchen, grabbing his keys, and then, pointedly, "Do the laundry, all right?" He's halfway out the door when—

Her thirst has been slaked, and it is this that wakes her, because she is always thirsty, now – has forgotten how satiation feels. The desert is her home (Has it always been her home? Of course it has.) and she loves it, but the trees here fight each other for moisture. They whisper ceaseless lies to each other and all the while, underground, their roots seek the deep reserves of water, curling around each other in an intricate, deadly embrace. Around her the rest of the forest wakes, and they lift their branches to cup the fog, a slow susurration of leaves, like waves—

 

There is a click. Carlos recognizes it, distantly, as the noise that his alarm makes, just before the radio comes on. Carlos... is Carlos. He has no idea what has just happened to him, but after a year and a half in this town, that's no longer surprising. Most likely, he'd only been dreaming: a simple, physiologically generated dream.

There is a crackle of static from the radio.

"We are cells in the body of the universe," says Cecil, his voice warm and familiar through the speakers. "Perhaps in the liver, perhaps in the brain. Perhaps in the blood. Our planet is a pulsating organ, warm and wet and absolutely essential, and we are cells in it. The universe is alive because of us. The universe. Is. Alive."

On the other hand, maybe it hadn't been a dream. Or maybe it _had_ been a dream, but that didn't mean it hadn't also been real. Carlos thinks maybe he should find out. The fog – if he could just take a sample...

There is wind, just a whisper at first and then a great gust of it, warm and fragrant with the scent of the desert. The fog evaporates, or gives way, or is absorbed – Carlos doesn't know which. All he knows is that it is gone. 

"Welcome," Cecil says, "to Night Vale." 

Carlos breathes out.


End file.
